Start-up week Germany: Seventy students stayed awake during the 4th CAMPUS Startup NIGHT
A night filled with ideas and inspiration: As part of the startup week Germany, ten founding teams with 70 national and international students participated in the “4th Campus Startup Night“ at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, in which they had to complete all preceding phases of founding a company.
The startup night started on early Friday evening and ended Saturday morning. Presented by Johanna Faustmann and Florian Zaschka, the audience and students of all fields followed two inspiring introductory talks by entrepreneur Christian Genheimer and startup founders Fabian Kunzmann and David Alt, both students of FHWS. The aim is to make students aware of what it takes to found one’s own company, how much self-discipline it takes and how big of a chance it can be to be self-employed during or after finishing university.
After the talks, the students split up into ten teams to work on ten different topics:
- Airship Mobile Complex
- Sustainable Reforms - Retution
- Shop Easy
- AI Kitchen – TR-Tensor Robotics
- World Educational Center – Blue Mind
- Think Blue – Blue Box
- Fastened your Seatbelts
- Customized Sneakers Platform
- T-CARS – Transformed Cars
- Student Wiki
Guided by the Design Thinking Coaches Michael Sabah, Tobias Greissing and Risheek Thamatham Reddy, the participants had one night to elaborate their ideas, to network, to receive guidance and to create a pitch deck presentation. The next morning, the ten student groups presented their results in front of a jury and visitors. The first place was claimed by team no. 7 with the topic “Fastened your Seatbelts” with idea provider Dhairya Shah. The second place was scored by team no. 2 with “Retution” and idea provider Patrick Grimmeisen. The third place was claimed by team no. 3 with “Shop Easy” and idea provider Sriprakash Ramanujam. After the awards presentation, participants and visitors could network and exchange over breakfast. The teams in the first ranks of the startup competition received prize money for further development of their ideas.
The ideas and concepts developed during this creative night will not disappear, instead they can be followed up on at the University. In the Startup Lab of the WERK:RAUM, students have the opportunity to continuously develop their plans following the (preceding) founding phases, to build prototypes in the labs and to conduct some initial testing. In addition to this, students can contact employees of the project EntrepreneurSHIP, who evaluate funding and implementation possibilities of the concepts, give tips and convey contacts.
This was the fourth “Campus Startup Night“ at FHWS after 2018, 2019 and 2021. The event was organised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Volker Bräutigam, Katharina Pfeuffer, Lisa Lehmann and Stefan Kuhn from WERK:RAUM at FHWS in cooperation with the EntrepreneurSHIP team, Ulrike Machalett-Gehring and Monika Waschik, the “Wirtschaftsjuniorinnen und -junioren”, the founding centre “Gründerzentrum GRIBS” and the local regional founding platform “Startbahn27“. Numerous sponsors supported this year’s event financially: Platinum sponsors: Stadt Schweinfurt, Landkreis Schweinfurt, bb-net GmbH, Schäflein AG, ENER-IQ GmbH, Sparkasse, Bankhaus Max Flessa AG and Dr. G Fischer Jugendstiftung. Gold sponsors: ZF AG, Kanzlei Scholl Rechtsanwälte, TRIPS GmbH, Gründerzentrum GRIBS Schweinfurt, Simplifier AG and Deutsche Dienstrad GmbH. Silver sponsors: Kritzner Metalltechnik GmbH, FRÄNKISCHE Rohrwerke Gebr. Kirchner GmbH & Co. KG.
For detailed information, see the link of the Start-up week Germany and for the CAMPUS Startup NIGHT at FHWS e.g. our Instagram-profile Insta WERK:RAUM.
Contact: Hochschule Würzburg-Schweinfurt
Katharina Pfeuffer
Institute of Digital Engineering- IDEE
Startup Lab WERK:RAUM
Landwehrstraße 46
97421 Schweinfurt
+49 9721 940 – 8476
katharina.pfeuffer[at]fhws.de
